Sci-Net

This is gonna be a disaster. They would have been better off using an existing cryptocurrency instead of rolling their own. The problem with these "meme tokens" is that they are typically designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator. And even worse, this has no anonymity, so the users are gonna get busted for using it.

> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.

"Interesting"

https://c.tenor.com/K_aiz0CjfNgAAAAd/dr-evil.gif

> designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator

Isn't benefiting the creator an explicit purpose/benefit of this system? (i.e. to fund the continued operation of sci-hub)

At least rolling their own crypto might give the project their own hosting. But if their crypto is Solana, it does not count.

Benefiting the system is way more imporltant.

Yes, but that should be done in a way more transparent way (donations, fees, etc.) than manipulating the tokenomics of the coin out from under you.

I thought the taxation vs inflation point you made in an earlier edit of this comment was a good one, did something make you change your mind to remove it?

The new trend of starting a "token" on top of some PoS cryptocurrency greatly saddens me.

Back in the old days, you would have to actually start your own cryptocurrency (like Dogecoin) every time you wanted to sell some worthless token. Not only did this result in more technical diversity of cryptocurrencies, but if you got enough people together you could do a 51% attack and take malicious projects off the network.

Nowadays, this would never work. Even if they couldn't hitch a ride on another cryptocurrency, they would just use PoS and with a premine it's basically classical consensus.

No, I just thought it was too long and distracted from my initial point. I can't edit it back, but for anyone else interested it was like this:

"In the same way it's better to fund public services by taxing things directly than by inflating the currency because it's easier to manipulate the metrics for inflation than to manipulate direct taxation, and the taxpayer ultimately needs to make sense of what they're paying for in a democracy."

Special-purpose tokens are perfectly fine, and in fact, are what you should do whenever you want to represent something specific. You can make a token that represents an article request, or a bond, or a share of an investment fund, or anything else, and then someone can trade a certain number of them. Also, the market can figure out how much one of them is worth. It might even be more stable than the base token, as in the case of DAI (an decentralized stablecoin on the Ethereum chain).